Improving safety performance through a user-centric knowledge-based system for fall risk assessment

BackgroundFall from height (FFH) incidents remain a significant concern in the construction industry worldwide. Experts suggested integrating the knowledge management (KM) concept into safety risk assessment (RA) to improve safety performance. However, a notable gap exists regarding a dedicated KM system for fall RA, particularly for formwork operations.ObjectiveThis study aims to develop and evaluate a knowledge-based system that facilitates fall RA for vertical formwork operations in Indian construction projects.MethodologyA mixed-method approach was adopted to develop and evaluate the knowledge-based system. First, the Delphi survey was adopted to acquire knowledge from the thirteen experts on causes of falls, individuals at risk, safety risk levels, and preventive measures. Next, the document analysis was conducted to acquire the best safety practices, accident records, research publications, and guidelines/standards for vertical formwork operations. Once the knowledge was captured, a knowledge-based system was designed to store and reuse the acquired knowledge. The proposed system was then evaluated using a survey with the 20 potential end-users based on three criteria: effectiveness, system benefits, and challenges the system addresses. The inter-rater reliability was analyzed using Krippendorff's alpha, a statistical measure assessing consistency among multiple raters. Additionally, the researchers conducted a descriptive statistical analysis of the data.ResultsThe results indicate that the proposed system offers numerous benefits to builders in (1) ensuring that end-users, regardless of their site location, have easy access to vertical formwork safety knowledge; (2) helping users with job site learning of safety RA skills; (3) effectively sharing safety knowledge; (4) facilitating the fall RA process on-the-job for safety heads; (5) helping to improve safety performance; and (6) saving time that is spent on RA.ConclusionThe proposed knowledge-based system is anticipated to assist users in making decisions in the construction organizations during vertical formwork activities during fall RA.